Mixed-signal architecture of randomized receding horizon control for miniature robotics

Control of miniature mobile robots in unconstrained environments is an ongoing challenge. Miniature robots often exhibit nonlinear dynamics and obstacle avoidance introduces sigificant complexity in the control problem. Furthermore, miniature robots have strict power and size constraints, drastically reducing on-board processing power and severely limiting the capability of digital implementations of nonlinear model predictive controllers. To accommodate the demands of this application area, we describe the architecture of a mixed-signal mobile robot control system using randomized receding horizon control. We compare the proposed mixed-signal implementation with purely digital control systems in terms of power requirements and precision and find that the mixed-signal implementation offers significant reductions in power consumption at an acceptable loss of precision.